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Wednesday, April 04, 2007

This one has been spread around a bit... Civil strife on Rubber Avenue in Naugatuck as a photo store owner has a sign urging people beep their horns for Christ. The neighboring tattoo store counters by having people beep for Satan. It's all too much noise for the town fathers, who tell them to stop.

This is a fun sort of news story, especially at this time of year, but it raises larger issues. Here's what I mean: although Channel 8 made the gentleman sound reasonable, in a country where Christianity is the religion of most citizens, can't we even enjoy Easter Week without listening to this sort of nonsense from the tattoo shop owner?

Claudette Soden, owner of Photos Onto DVD, had put similar signs up at Christmas when her business was at a different location and said she was continuing that tradition at Easter.

Young, who did not respond to a request by The Associated Press for comment, has said he viewed Soden's message as a sign of religious intolerance for non-Christians.

So now a sign that says "Beep for Christ" during Easter Week is a message of religious intolerance? Where did Mr. Young learn this idea and master this rhetoric?

It's instructive and frightening to watch Americans and Europeans spout this stuff all the time while bending over backwards to promote preferential treatment for Islamic radicals and homosexual activists. Now they're even casting Christian terrorists as the villains in school terror drills. We are being trained slowly but surely to view any expression of Christian faith as illegitimate in a pluralistic society, when in fact it is Christianity that makes possible the existence of a society allowing other faiths to exist and be practiced without consequence.